As Carmilla nodded at their work, a third upyr, this one dressed in typical ostentatious vampire fashion, walked into the room. “My lady,” he said, “while I appreciate your thoroughness, there is no way that anyone could have survived that blast.”
Carmilla shook her head. “Only one body has been pulled from the rubble of the Caulborn’s headquarters. Until Corinthos’s corpse has been found, we must assume he is still alive. The runes will prevent him from creating portals into our domain.”
That sounded like a challenge. I tried to Open a peephole into the room being displayed on screen and found I couldn’t. I cursed and thought back to what I’d seen in that email thread between Treggen and Vasylna, and Gears was right, I couldn’t create portals into a warded area. So much for this being easy. “You really think he survived?” the male upyr asked.
“I have learned that anything is possible, Anton. You would be wise to do the same.”
“And what of the woman? Our client’s orders were that she was not to be harmed. She was in the blast, was she not?”
“Alexey had instructions to bring her back here.”
The other upyr pursed his lips. “We... have lost contact with Alexey.”
Carmilla shot forward, grabbing Anton by the throat and lifting him off the ground. “Why was I not told this?”
“Apologies, my lady,” Anton gasped. “It slipped my mind.” The other two upyr worked a little faster carving a second ring of runes on the walls.
“I want a list of anyone else who has not reported in. Confirm their presence or absence personally, Anton. Am I clear?”
“Quite clear, my lady.” She threw the upyr across the room where he slammed into a thick wooden door. He let himself out and practically ran down the hall. Carmilla, still angry at the situation, grabbed up a spare hammer from the ground and hurled it.
Right into our probe.
The Gizmatronic device crashed against the wall and went dark.
Megan turned to Gearstripper. “What happened?”
Gears shrugged. “She broke the probe.”
Megan was incredulous. “Seriously? The thing can see through multiple spectrums of light and can alter its size, but it can’t take a hit from a hammer?”
“In the comics, Gizmatron’s probes were always easy to destroy. It looks like those weaknesses translated over to real life when Vinnie turned this place into Courage Point.”
“Can we get one of the other probes into Carmilla’s sanctum?” Galahad asked.
“I’ll reroute one of them now,” Gears said, tapping on the keyboard.
“Excellent,” the boss nodded. “Gearstripper, make sure you find a way into that chamber. Megan, Vincent, we have some planning to do.”
Over the course of the next few hours, we researched ways to kill psoglavs and rusalkas. As I walked down the hallway, I glanced into one of the bedrooms and saw Doc Ryan standing in front of a full-length mirror, staring at his reflection. He was dressed in his tux, but had an odd expression on his face.
“You all right, Doc?”
Without turning from the mirror, he said, “I haven’t seen this face in years. It reminds me of who I was. I was cocky, cynical, brash—”
“So the same as you are now but with darker hair?”
“Pound sand, Corinthos,” he said, but not unkindly. He turned from the mirror, smiled at me, then looked down. “You know, I didn’t say thank you.”
“For the tux? No problem.”
He shook his head. “No, for this.” He gestured to himself. “Being made young again. I know you didn’t do it on purpose, Corinthos, but still. Being cured of cancer was one thing. But being given decades of my life back? That’s something else entirely. And now, here I am in a tuxedo, about to go on a date with a literal goddess.” He shook his head. “I keep expecting to wake up and this will all have been some ridiculous dream.”
“It’s real enough, Doc,” I said. The front doorbell rang.
“Regeneration energy detected,” Alexis’s voice came. “Panacea stands outside.”
I went to the front door and ushered Panacea in. The goddess of healing was dressed in a strapless white evening gown with a purple sash at her waist. Her hair was done up in curls and hung down over her shoulders. She wore flats, putting her a few inches shorter than Doc.
“These are for you, Vincent Corinthos,” she said, handing me a box of roses. “I crafted six of them for you. They shall animate and kill any vampiric life form they touch.” She then produced a white rose boutonniere. “This is for you, Dr. Ryan.”
Doc looked embarrassed. “Please, just Joe.”
Panacea smiled. “Joe.” They looked at each other for a moment, and then Panacea turned back to me. “I expect you are about to do something very dangerous, bordering on foolhardy, with those roses, Vincent Corinthos. Is that a fair statement?”
“Foolhardy is a bit harsh...”
Panacea raised an eyebrow at me. “I mean to ask if you can spare the doctor for a few hours this evening.”
“Joseph deserves a night off,” Mrs. Rita said as she ambled around the corner. Her movements were more fluid now. She appeared to be feeling better. “I will watch over Vincent and the Caulborn tonight.”
Panacea looked skeptical. It was, in fact, the same expression that Mrs. Rita used on me when I told her I was ready to be up and out of Medical again. “I am not certain if you should be out of bed so soon, Messesrhitha,” Panacea said. “Just because you’re—” Mrs. Rita held up a hand. Panacea stopped and reconsidered her words. “You are a strong individual, but even you have limits. Rosario poison has killed some of the most powerful beings in the universe, and it should not be taken lightly.”
Mrs. Rita nodded. “I am in no condition to fight,” she said. “I know my limits, Panacea. I will remain behind and communicate with the others, provide what assistance I can remotely.”
Panacea considered this, then nodded. “That is well.”
Doc looked at Panacea and extended his arm. “Shall we?”
She took his arm and gave a dazzling smile. “We shall.”
I’d changed one of the rooms in the house back to the original parlor and led them there, where I’d had Alexis replicate coffee, tea, and a handful of finger foods. Olympian introductions aren’t like modern dates. The two people sit and talk for some time, usually under the watchful eye of a chaperone or six. The fact that Panacea hadn’t brought any would undoubtedly be seen as a bit of a scandal.
As the door closed behind them, I turned to Mrs. Rita. “We need to talk.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “I watched you throw upyr around like dolls, you took shotgun blasts to the chest without flinching, and there have been several times lately when you’ve worked some kind of magic that’s more than your run-of-the-mill enchantment. You’re keeping secrets, Mrs. Rita.”
Mrs. Rita assumed a too-innocent expression. “Oh, Vincent? And you were so quick to disclose that you could create portals? That you could turn invisible?”
“That was different,” I said. “There was a lot going on.”
“As there is now. Galahad wants to see you. Go on now.” She made shooing motions at me.
“We are going to have this conversation,” I called over my shoulder as I made my way to Galahad.
“Someday, perhaps,” Mrs. Rita called back. “But not today. Tomorrow is unlikely as well.”
The former priest was standing, hands clasped behind his back as he regarded the map displayed on Alexis’s screen. I dropped the box of roses on the table and moved next to him, taking in what was displayed onscreen. The remaining probes had finished mapping out the tunnels and had marked sentries, hazards, and the pathway to Carmilla’s sanctum. “We have a dangerous night ahead of us, Vincent,” Galahad said.
“Are you
sure you want to do this now, boss?”
Galahad’s expression was grim. “We need to. The upyr feel secure right now, believing they’ve finished their jobs. Emergency crews just found the skeletons you planted, so this will be the time to strike.”
Thinking about the bodies brought up a question I hadn’t wanted to ask. “What will happen to Kristin’s body?”
“Uncle Dave will have it collected. Kristin didn’t have any next of kin. Her sister and mother were killed in a car crash when she was five, and her father…”
“I know about her father,” I said. Kristin’s dad, a stage magician known as the Amazing Mozzoti, had been killed in a zombie attack when she was a kid. Only instead of rising as a typical brain-muncher, he’d come back as an annual zombie, one that respawned in the same place every year. Kristin had been returning to Oklahoma every year to kill her father again and again.
Galahad nodded at me. “We will hold a memorial service for Kristin when this is over.”
“What about Mist?” Megan asked.
“Fylgiar return to their home dimension when the person they’re attached to dies. My understanding is that Mist can’t return to the world of men for a year after the death, at which point, she will be reassigned to a newborn child who possesses a caul, and will serve that child as she served Kristin.”
Megan moved up to us and gestured to the long white box on the Defender’s Society table. “Are those what I think they are?”
“Yeah,” I said, lifting the lid and showing the roses inside. “Panacea just dropped these off,” I said, dropping the lid. “They should come in handy.”
Megan took a step away from them, grimacing. “I have come to hate roses in the last year,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure Carmilla and company will hate them more by the time tonight’s over,” I said. I gestured at the map on the screen. “Do we have a path picked out?”
Galahad nodded. “We’ll go through here,” he said, pointing at the left branch of the map. “You’ll notice there aren’t as many sentries along this route. I suspect that there will be traps.”
“Billy and I will take care of those, no problem,” Gears chirped.
“From what we can tell,” Galahad continued, “the upyr haven’t covered their entire lair with those portal blocking runes, Vincent, but they are quite prevalent. There are only a handful of places where they are absent.” He gestured to a series of rooms that were shaded in green.
I rubbed my chin. “If I were a betting man, I’d say those places are either ambush points or trapped, as well.”
“My thoughts exactly. Therefore, I suggest you portal us in here,” said, indicating a point on the map that was probably half a mile away from the lair. “It doesn’t look like the upyr’s fortifications extend that far. From there, we will make our way to this corridor.”
“What about the sentries along the way?” I asked.
“I’ve adapted Billy to put out a high-pitched sonic burst, something outside the range of human hearing, but that should incapacitate the psoglav,” Gears said.
“And the rusalka can be subdued by more traditional means,” Megan added. “Alexis was able to replicate a bunch of silver ammo for me.”
“And we have flowers for Carmilla,” I said. “Excellent. Let’s take a little more time to do recon. I don’t want to leave anything to chance.” Galahad smiled at me, and Megan and I began combing over what we knew so far, making sure we hadn’t missed anything.
I was skimming through some data on psoglavs when the prayer came in. Lord Corinthos, grant us strength against our enemies. It was Kleep’s voice, followed by a prayer from Jeal: I fight these undead in your name, Vincent Corinthos.
More prayers came in as I looked through Jeal’s eyes and saw a handful of vampires fighting the kobolds in Cather’s front room. The main door to the house had been ripped off, and the vamps were slashing at the kobolds with long knives. The kobolds proved to be adept combatants, however, turning invisible and dashing around the upyr. Of course, vamps can scent living creatures, so the invisibility didn’t do much more than aggravate the vamps, which, I suppose was the main idea.
Jeal and Kleep fought back to back, knives of their own spinning and thrusting. I blessed both of them, fortifying their resolve, sharpening their senses. I gave Kleep a bit of extra agility, enabling him to just dodge out of the way of a vampire’s strike, and bolstered Jeal’s strength a touch to let her drive a stake just a bit further into another’s chest, thus turning it to ash.
And suddenly, I understood what Galahad had been talking about with subtle influences. All of the kobolds were praying to me, and I could see through all their eyes at once. That should have been disorienting, but instead, it felt natural. I split my focus, giving the kobolds extra strength, determination, and endurance.
The lead vampire gave a grin that was all teeth. I recognized him from Tom Bruli’s place. It looked like Carmilla was using the local vamps for this fight. “The little mongrels fight hard, do they not? But your god is dead. And you have sins to atone for. You stole our mistress’s food. We have come to take your blood in repayment.”
And with that, the vampires’ ferocity intensified. I watched as they grabbed kobolds by the throat and hurled them across the room like dolls. I sensed the kobolds’ faith in me shudder. All of them but Kleep believed that I was dead. I touched Jeal’s mind and whispered.
I am always with you, Jeal. And then I did something I hadn’t intended to. A bit of my power flowed across dimensions and into my Prime Liberator. She gasped and stumbled, right into the path of an upyr. The undead snarled and raised his knife, plunging it straight down at Jeal’s chest.
A sizzling sound filled the air, and the vamp stared at the shimmering blue hole that his arm had plunged through.
I’d blessed Jeal with portals.
My Prime Liberator scrambled out from under her attacker and tried to snap the portal shut, but it couldn’t close with the vampire’s arm still inside. Realizing the upyr was trapped, Jeal bounded forward and stabbed him through the eye with her knife. As he fell forward, she pulled his arm free of her portal. The portal snapped shut, but she created another one and came out behind a different vampire, stabbing him in the back with her knife.
Don’t do so much work, I sent to her. Stay where you are. Open a portal, put the exit point behind your target, and stab. Jeal was a quick study and began knifing the upyr without moving. The vamps began screaming and flailing as they tried to figure out where the attacks were coming from. “Is it Corinthos?” one of them asked in a panic.
“It’s not Corinthos, it’s her!” another said, snapping a finger out at Jeal. “Kill her!”
In response, all of the kobolds let loose with elemental fire at the pointer. He went up like he was made of straw, and the scent of burned, dead flesh filled the air. Kleep popped into his mini-dragon form and ripped out the throat of the vamp nearest him. Jeal continued stabbing them through portals. My other followers were a blur as they vanished and reappeared, clawing, biting, burning. And then it was over. Six vampires down. I took stock of my followers; most of them had suffered minor injuries, but none had been bitten.
Jeal’s voice came through to me. We give thanks to you, Vincent Corinthos. And my faith reserves swelled.
I broke the mental link with Jeal and reflected on what I’d just done. That wouldn’t have been possible with the Urisk; the species-wide lobotomy that Karlegon had performed prevented them from acting as independently as the kobolds just had. I ran my hands through my hair. I’d just protected the kobolds without jumping into the fray. I’d made it so they were more capable of protecting themselves, rather than doing it for them. But what had I done to Jeal? Was that blessing permanent? How much of my power had I just bestowed upon her, and how long would it last?
As I pondere
d this, a sense of contentment and pride came to me from my Prime Liberator. She felt worthy; she had been blessed and was grateful for it. I couldn’t help but smile.
“Are you all right, Vincent?” Galahad asked.
I smiled at him. “I’m great, boss,” I said. “I think I’m starting to understand what we were talking about earlier, about helping the kobolds help themselves.”
“I had a feeling it would come to you,” he replied.
“The upyr believe we’re dead,” I said. “A group of them just attacked the kobolds.”
Concern washed over Galahad’s face. “Are they all right?”
I nodded. “Yes, but the upyr seem to be using compelled Boston vampires.” As I explained to Galahad what I’d just seen, Megan came over.
She tapped her fingers on the table. “Carmilla’s probably trying out some of the local vampires to see who would fit well in her regime. She must’ve figured this would be an easy first mission for them, and if it wasn’t, then she’d weed some losers out.”
“A cold approach,” Galahad said, “but a likely one.”
“It bothers me that they’re replenishing their numbers that fast,” I said. “Don’t vampires typically wait a while to, um, recruit, new members?”
“Tom Bruli and the Midnight Clan do,” Megan said with a nod. “But Carmilla’s another story. She only has a handful of soldiers to work with and likely doesn’t want to be seen as weak by anyone else in the paranormal community. So she’d be certain to leave Boston with the same number of people she arrived with.”
Nightfall: Caulborn 5 Page 19
